Rutter takes the complexity out of building integrations for business financial data and workflows. Our Universal API allows companies to read and write data from multiple e-commerce platforms, accounting systems, and payment processors.

In the last few months, we’ve had hundreds of conversations with product teams building financial business software from companies like Ramp, Mercury, Airwallex, Alaanpay, and many more. We’ve also spent time speaking with advisors who were end users of this software and companies like Doordash, Twilio, Amplitude, and Zipline.

Today, we’re introducing functionality to build Expense Management (EM) and Accounts Payable (AP) automation workflows using Rutter’s Write Accounting API for platforms like Quickbooks Online, Quickbooks Desktop, Netsuite, Xero, Sage, Microsoft Dynamics and Zohobooks.

Schedule a demo to see our API in action here.

Building the Best Product for Finance Teams Using Rutter’s Accounting API

We’ve seen a proliferation of new companies building for finance teams in the last few years, bringing in best-in-class product experiences to an otherwise traditional industry.

Companies like Ramp, Mercury, Airwallex, and more have built best-in-class financial software products to core finance and accounting workflows like reporting, expense management, AP  and AR automation, bookkeeping, equity management, payroll, equity management and more.

From chatting with companies in this space, we observe that there’s a common thread in what they need to do: they all help companies process money and in order to do that, they need to be able to read and push financial data into different financial systems like NetSuite, Quickbooks, Xero, Microsoft Dynamics, Sage, Zoho, Freshbooks and more.

These companies simplify these processes by automating multiple manual processes like procurement, invoice processing, paying invoices, writing expenses into companies’ financial system and more by having these key integrations.

Mapping Accounting Workflows with the APIs of Accounting Systems

Building these read-and-write integrations into accounting platforms, on top of understanding the nuances of these accounting workflows is not simple. From conversations with product teams building these integrations and accounting teams using the end products that these integrations power, we’ve learned that there are 3 key steps:

1. Learning the various parts of the expense management and accounts payable automation workflows
2. Understanding how each step is mapped to the endpoints of accounting systems
3. Building the Read & Write Accounting integrations to power these workflows across accounting platforms

Most companies have figured out step 1 from talking to their end customers, but struggle with steps 2 and 3 because of the time required to ramp up on understanding the nuances of various accounting platforms and translating their customer requirements into how to build it using the platform-specific APIs.

Rutter’s Write Accounting API for Expense Management Workflows

At Rutter, we’ve built the universal API for accounting that makes it easy for any company looking to build expense management and AP automation products to build their integrations with accounting systems in days instead of months, and with more precision and accuracy.

In the past 6 months, we have:

• Spent time understanding these different accounting workflows by talking to some of the fastest-moving companies in the space and accountant and controller advisors who work as end users.
• Mapped each of these key workflows with the appropriate endpoints in every major accounting system like Quickbooks Online, Quickbooks Desktop, Netsuite, Xero, Sage, Microsoft Dynamics and Zohobooks.
• Built a flexible and customizable Universal API abstraction that helps save product and engineering teams hundreds of hours, while also allowing for the full granularity you would get integrating to each individual platform. Our Platform Expands and Connection Credentials Passthrough features allow you to fetch granular, unnormalized data from an accounting platform, and our Custom Fields feature lets you access custom data across any accounting instance.

What’s next

Building for expense management and accounts payables is the first step in managing all money movement workflows for businesses. In the coming months we’ll be announcing Accounting API support for all accounting workflows that companies need to build for their business customers.

If you’re interested in learning more, you can signup to chat with our team here.